Katherine Hijar
Assistant Professor of History
Education:
Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 2008
B.A. with High Honors, University of California, Berkeley, 2001
Research and Teaching Interests:
United States Social & Cultural History (Early Republic/Nineteenth Century)
History of Print, Visual Culture, & Early Mass Media
History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Urban History
Digital History
Honors and Awards:
Baltimore Museum of Art-JHU Graduate Curatorial Fellowship Award (2006-2007)
Co-recipient, JHU Technology Fellowship Award,
(with Prof. Ronald G. Walters and John Astin, 2006-2007)
Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship, Boston Athenaeum (2005-2006)
Dean's Teaching Fellowship, The Johns Hopkins University (2005-2006)
Prize Teaching Fellowship, Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, The Johns Hopkins University (2004)
American Historical Print Collectors Society Fellowship,
American Antiquarian Society (2004)
Selected Presentations:
"Seeing and Being Seen: Urban Male Voyeurism and Spectacles of Femininity"
Panel: “The Spectacle of Gender in the Early Republic”
Australian & New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, July 2008
“Looking at Prints as Historical Evidence: The Challenges of Bringing the Historian’s Vision into the Public Eye."
Roundtable Panel: "Gender and Visual Culture: Assessing Current Methodologies”
Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 2008
"The Ann Murphy Rape Case: Violence, Sexual Intimacy, and Gender Identities in Antebellum Print Culture"
Roundtable panel: "Gender Trouble"
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, July 2006.
Publications:
"The Pin-Up, the Piano, and the Parlor: American Sheet Music, 1840 – 1860," Imprint (Autumn 2005)
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13674
Service:
Member, Graduate and Early Career Committee (GECC)
American Historical Association (2008-present)
Member, Committee on Women Historians
American Historical Association (2008-present)
Member, Affiliate Board, Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
The Johns Hopkins University (2002-05)
Dr. Hijar is currently revising her dissertation, “Sexuality, Print, and Popular Visual Culture in the United States, 1830-1870,” for publication. This project explores the ideological work of a variety of subversive print sources that were published in American cities between 1830 and 1870: racy newspapers and novels, sensational gothic and "mysteries of the city" narratives, pornographic texts, brothel guides, and a variety of mechanically reproduced pictorial images. Relying on close readings of both texts and illustrations, this project illuminates the ways that words and images helped define notions of manhood, created an imagined American community of men, justified male sexual aggression against women, and powerfully enforced the idea that the very purpose of women’s existence was to please men. By defining both positive and negative male and female identities, authors and artists also helped define the limits of social and political change for women and men alike.
Dr. Hijar also curated the Web exhibit, “Beauty, Virtue, and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints,” which can be found at http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Beauty/
